The miner’s trading and marketing division chipped in top-line earnings of $2.5bn, down only 12%, suggesting its chief, Ivan Glasenberg, was right about the resilience of the old part of Glencore’s empire.

Actual mining, of course, was a different story: top-line earnings fell 38% to $6bn, but then came a mass of impairment charges, restructuring costs and losses on disposals.

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But cashflow is king for miners these days and Glasenberg was able to boast the company can be “comfortably cash generative at current and even lower commodity prices”.

Jolly good, but a little humility would be in order given that the share price, even after a recovery of sorts, is still 75% below the float price of 2011.

Instead, Glasenberg gave another airing to his line about taking “early and decisive action” in challenging markets. This is nonsense.

A company taking early action would not have launched a $1bn share buy-back in autumn 2014, squandering the cash on overpriced shares before, in effect, asking shareholders for the money to be returned via a placing in autumn 2015. That little detail seems to have been airbrushed already.

Hit Paddy Power in the FOBTs

Paddy Power encouraged a problem gambler to use its fixed-odds betting terminals (FOBTs) until he lost five jobs, his home and access to his children, according to a report this week.

The details of the case, one of three “serious failings” at the bookmaker recorded by the Gambling Commission, are extraordinary. The penalty wasn’t. The company made a voluntary payment of £280,000 to a “socially responsible” cause. That’s not even a slap on the wrist.

Here’s a better remedy: order the offending bookie to turn off all its FOBTs for a month. Each machine yields about £1,000 pure profit a week, and there can be four per shop, meaning thousands of machines for a national chain.

Deprived of those risk-free winnings for a few weeks, they’d be jumping through hoops to obey the industry’s (lightweight) code of practice.